a cooking blog for friends and family

Tag Archives: Pasta

This weekend we had my cousin Dana (quite a talented jewelry-maker – check out her Etsy site) over for dinner and a sleep-over with the kids while my wife was out of town on business. Since she had some errands to run in Manhattan, we weren’t entirely sure when she’d make it over, so I popped a pot of water onto the stove to get to a boil and decided to make something that could be thrown together last-minute. Last week we got some lovely nectarines in our CSA fruit share and I thought savory and sweet/tart go so very well together…

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I know, I know. I said I’d be writing about CSA food, but this dish went over so well with the family that I figured I’d probably better post it. It was originally going to be a salad, but the weather is so changeable here in NY these days that by the time the late afternoon came around it seemed too chilly for it. So pasta it became. Last weekend we headed out to the North Fork of Long Island and hit a vineyard or two as well as Hallock’s Cider Mill (in Laurel, NY) on the way home. There we picked up a really nice looking bunch of asparagus and a strawberry rhubarb pie. The pie doesn’t enter into this recipe… I just mentioned it for the sake of being complete, description-wise. Anyway, last night I made a pasta dish with it. The asparagus… not the pie. That would have been weird.

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So we got a LOT of pea shoots over the past few weeks in our CSA. Now, I like pea shoots (which taste like a very mild combination of sweet peas and baby salad greens), but there really is only so much you can put on a sandwich or in a salad. Then I remembered that you can make pesto out of almost any green, leafy vegetable – arugala, spinach, basil (of course), etc. – and I wondered if making a pesto from our massive pile of pea shoots was a possibility. The answer, of course, was yes.